Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer, kept fighting in the jungle of a Philippine island until 1974, because no one he trusted had told him the war was over. In a sense the Second World War has never quite ended for the rest of us either. The borders of Europe, the United Nations, the language of human rights, the nuclear age and the quarrels nations still have about memory all come out of a war that killed tens of millions of people, most of them civilians.

You will follow the road from the broken peace of the 1930s through the fall of France, the Eastern Front, the Pacific, the Holocaust, occupied cities and the decision to use the atomic bomb, meeting soldiers, factory workers, collaborators, rescuers and resisters along the way. The aim is not to memorize battles but to judge hard choices fairly: why sensible people backed appeasement, how ordinary officials made genocide possible, why historians still disagree about Hiroshima. With that grounding you can read wartime propaganda with a critical eye, see how the war still shapes the institutions around you, and explain why the generation that survived it wrote equal human dignity into law.